History 291, Spring 2006
Final Exercise
Complete BOTH parts. It would help if you submitted them
as
two separate papers,
taking care to place your name and precept on each. The exercise
is due on Monday, 22 May, at 3:00 in the History Department Office,
129 Dickinson Hall. Both parts of the exercise are "open
book". You may
refer to the readings and other course materials, along with your notes
from lectures and precept. Since this is a take-home exercise, it falls
under Academic Regulations
rather than the Honor Code. Hence, it requires the statement
"This paper represents my own work in accordance with University
regulations" with your
signature,
attesting that you have read and
understand the provisions set forth in Academic
Integrity at Princeton.
Part I (30%)
Following are six passages taken from the sources read this semester.
Choose
FOUR of them and for each identify the author and work and write a
paragraph
explaining the significance of the passage for the development of
science in
the 16th and 17th centuries. (Total length: 800 words)
- Thus nature, ever perfect and divine, doing nothing in
vain, has neither given a heart where it was not required, nor produced
it before its office had become necessary; but by the same stages in
the development of every animal, passing through the forms of all, as I
may say (ovum, worm, foetus), it acquires perfection in each.
These points will be found elsewhere confirmed by numerous observations
on the formation of the foetus.
- And thus Nature will be very conformable to
her self and very simple, performing all the great Motions of the
heavenly Bodies by the Attraction of Gravity which intercedes those
Bodies, and almost all the small ones of their Particles by some other
attractive and repelling Powers which intercede the Particles.
- I could set out here many additional rules
for determining in detail when and how and by how much the motion of
each body can be diverted and increased or decreased by colliding with
others, something that comprises summarily all the effects of
nature. But I shall be content with showing you that, besides the
three laws that I have explained, I wish to suppose no others but those
that most certainly follow from the eternal truths on which the
mathematicians are wont to support their most certain and most evident
demonstrations; the truths, I say, according to which God Himself has
taught us He disposed all things in number, weight, and measure.
- But
by far the greatest hindrance and aberration of the human understanding
proceeds from the dullness, incompetency, and deceptions of the senses;
in that things which strike the sense outweigh things which do not
immediately strike it, though they be more important. ... For the sense
by itself is a thing infirm and erring; neither can instruments for
enlarging or sharpening the sense do much; but all the truer kind of
interpretation of nature is effected by instances and experiments fit
and apposite; wherein the sense decides touching the experiment only,
and the experiment touching the point in nature and the thing itself.
- My
purpose is to set forth a very new science dealing with a very ancient
subject. There is, in nature, perhaps nothing older than motion,
concerning which the books written by philosophers are neither few nor
small; nevertheless I have discovered by experiment some propoerties of
it which are worth knowing and which have not hitherto been either
observed or demonstrated ... for so far as I know, no one has yet
pointed out that the distances traversed during equal intervals of
time, by a body falling from rest, stand to one another in the same
ratio as the odd numbers beginning with unity.
Part II (70%)
Write an essay of about 2000 words on ONE of the following topics.
Be
sure to support your argument by specific examples taken from the
readings
and lectures.
- One of the commonly identified features of the Scientific
Revolution is the rise of experimental
practice. According to Steven Shapin, scientists
employed three "technologies" to further this approach
to understanding nature: the material, the literary,
and the social. Explain the meaning and significance
of Shapin's argument and apply his analysis to two
of the following readings: Descartes's Le Monde,
Galileos Discourses and Demonstrations Concerning
Two New Sciences, Query 31 of Newton's Opticks,
Harvey's Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, Hooke's Micrographia,
the Accademia del Cimento's Essayes
of Natural Experiments.
- How
is the work of Vesalius and Harvey (and the relationship between their
work) illustrative or characteristic of patterns of investigation and
thought found in other scientific fields during the Scientific
Revolution, and in what ways does their work follow different
patterns? Do you want to speak of a "revolution" in the life
sciences at this time?
-
"To begin at the intellectual end, the Scientific
Revolution was a transformation of our knowledge of the external world.
It changed the questions we asked, the means we used to explore them,
and the character of the answers." (Sivin, p. 544)
Evaluate Sivin's assessment of the Scientific Revolution as a
transformation of the questions, methods, and answers that comprise our
"knowledge of the external world." You may choose to discuss changes in
scientific activity in general or choose a particular path of inquiry
(medicine, mechanics, etc.) on which to focus your essay.
-
"He deserves not the knowledge of nature that scorns to
converse even
with mean persons, that have the opportunity to be very conversant with
her."
Robert Boyle, The Usefulness of
Experimental Philosophy
Who were the people "very conversant" with nature in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, and to what extent and how did their practical
know-how become "knowledge of nature" in the sense meant by Boyle?
PLEDGE
"This paper represents my own work in accordance with University
regulations."